14Every life has a story, it is a story, and creates many stories around it.

Most gamers start with Dungeons & Dragons as their form of live interactive fiction. The lesson learned from D&D style storytelling are simple and thankfully the support for creating those stories has improved over the years. However, much of that Bardic wisdom remains untapped.

TVTropes explains much of the possibility from theme, into mood, and character and motif to make them almost clichés. Another even offering this

These only offer a world of rules and pre-packaged techniques that can be applied and their beauty is not forthcoming lacking a true heart to inflame our passion. Because even if the emotion is expressed by a master, it lacks relevance in our current world.

The art of a good story is to craft a tail that has a life of it’s own with twists and turns, failures and triumphs, and most of all one that can be seen by other.

Beyond that a great story is never just told, but the teller also listens and interact with the other players of the game. To highlight each player’s character in a way that only they can shine.

Even to showcase a minor character in a major way to show that as the individual grows, and demonstrate

I have a love of historical maps and Voommaps 1934 copy of Gregory’s Sydney Directory provides a great resource for creating a rich gaming world based in reality. As a game master it saves me a huge amount of time to have this available to filling in the blanks.

Both of the examples below are interesting options for creating a unique city or world for fantasy adventures. A lot of good stories take an odd concept or what-if and just apply everyday logic to it to see what grows and takes shape.

Bones of the Dead

And if some legendary heroes downed a Tarrasque [stats], then this could be the template for the city that emerges from around the bones and keeps it contained. This thread about a city in the D&D universe which is built around the Tarrasque provides great inspiration for a city built around a single thing.

Tippyverse

Then there is the Tippyverse, which is described in this very long thread about all the major cities on the world connected by teleport circles and all production is handles by magical traps. I guess they trigger a magical effect, like fabricate/create food & water/etc. It’s a world where the wizards rule all and are heavily involved with the control of the cities

Alternative Places

But even the two great examples above are still bound by the classic ideas of what a city is.

Does a city need to fill a large area of space? Can a city use magic to exist on the surface of a coin or other small object? Or drawing from the stories of the faeries, can it fill the dreams of others?

Does a city need to be bound to the material plane or can it occupy another reality? This could give rise to various planar adventures as the player reconnect cities that are in different realms with differing realities.

Do the city need to be alive? This can lead to a city of the dead (or undead), a ruined city from ancient times, or an empty automated city waiting for it people to return {Miranda from the movie Serenity}

Earthdawn, Shadowrun, Torg are all good examples of starting with a simple idea and seeing where it leads. All the best stories are What-ifs.

Dungeons & Dragons: Past, Present, and Future is running a showcase of all the character classes, which has been cool reminiscing about favoured character archetypes I’ve played and what they’ve achieved. However, it also reminds me about the limits of such systems and the various versions of AD&D, D&D where build around this. Althogth AD&D 2nd Ed did try a little variation with it’s four basic classes and multiple kits. This allowed characters that are hybrids collecting from multiple templates to create something unique.

To see some excellent examples of the character class stereotypes in popular culture (TV, film, pretty much everywhere) have a look at the showcases below;

A few years back now, I had the luck to help out with a painting project using a medieval recipe for the paint. Milk powder, builders lime and water. Mix up about 1 litre of milk powder and add 300 grams per litre of builders lime. It looks thin when applied. It has no real odour, an off-white colour, but can be coloured with oxides like ocher.